Abstract Accurate forecasting of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation is important for the planning, operation and optimization management system. However, it’s not easy task due to dynamic changes in volume, its composition or unpredictable factors. Initially, mainly conventional descriptive statistical models with demographic socioeconomic factors were used. Methods based on machine learnin...

H ealth care expenditures on the elderly have outpaced the gross domestic product (GDP) by 3.5 to 4.0 percent per year in recent decades. 1 This differential is partly attributable to demographic change, with the number of elderly growing about 1.0 percent per year faster than the rest of the population. By far the more important factor, however, is the rapid growth of age/sex-specific consumpt...

Intr oduction Generic medicines are a key instrument for governments to sustain their healthcare systems and control pharmaceutical expenditures. This contribution of generic medicines to the sustainability of European healthcare systems has been recognised by the High Level Pharmaceutical Forums, ‘Generic medicines provide an opportunity to obtain similar treatments at lower costs for patients...

A reliable prediction of unconditional welfare distributions, like income or consumption, is essential for welfare analysis, and in particular for inequality, poverty or development studies. Where observations of expenditures or income are missing, the mean prediction based on available covariates is not just a poor estimator of the unconditional distribution; it fails to predict the required i...

Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that redistributive government activities have a negative effect on investment in human capital using data from international comparative student achievement tests in Mathematics and Science for over 70 countries during the period 1980 to 2003. In fixed effects models, ...

OBJECTIVE We examined the relationship between state-level tobacco control expenditures and youth smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption. METHODS We estimated a 2-part model of cigarette demand using data from the 1991 through 2000 nationally representative surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students as part of the Monitoring the Future project. RESULTS We found that real per capi...

A systemic reappraisal of the thermic effect of food was done in lean and obese males randomly fed mixed meals containing 0, 8, 16, 24, and 32 kcal/kg fat-free mass. Densitometric analysis was used to measure body composition. Preprandial and postprandial energy expenditures were measured by indirect calorimetry. The data show that the thermic effect of food was linearly correlated with caloric...

The Great Recession confirmed a bedrock principle of modern consumption theory: It is impossible to explain aggregate spending behavior without knowledge of the underlying microeconomic distribution of circumstances and choices across households. National accounting frameworks therefore need to be augmented by “bottom up” measures that both (a) capture the microeconomic heterogeneity (in expend...